When We Were the Kennedys (18 page)

“That's enough,” Mum says, coming in. “They forgive you. You want something to eat?”

We all do. I sit at the table, eating my oatmeal, the bird perched on the rim of my bowl, flicking out the raisins. Nobody says much. I eat slowly, taking surreptitious peeks at my uncle, who looks the same as always, handsome and put together, no resemblance to the dancing man we saw yesterday. Against the rules, I teeter back in my chair, the better to slide a glance at his feet, which are not shod in clay at all but in a black, spit-shined pair of Maine-made wingtips.

Then Mum says, “You want some more?” and he says, “Are you trying to make me fat?” and Betty says, “YOU'RE A BIG FAT EGG,” and we all laugh, and the surreal feeling of that locked-door day begins nearly at once to fade.

He will tell me, in time, that this day was his turning point. It is also mine. As I watch him come back to himself, a feeling visits me, an odd warmth that I don't yet recognize as the essence of family love: the power to bestow forgiveness, to turn trespass into redemption, to stitch a lasting shape out of formless sorrows, even in a season already steeped in grief.

He comes back on the following Thursday, same as always, clean-shaven and wet-combed and shoeshined, to take us up the pond or down the pond. And then, just as school resumes in September, he disappears.

H
E CAN'T MAKE
it today, Mum said the first week.

The second week: Last Rites. Can't make it.

The week after that: Bishop visiting. Can't be helped.

And again: Parish council meeting.

And now here we are, in full autumn, and he's missed another Thursday. We haven't seen Father Bob once since school started—fifth grade for me, third for Cathy; and third for Betty because Mum's decided to keep trying.

The days snap open anyway, in that distinctive way of fall days, short and crisp, a sensation of change afoot. But nothing changes. Mum's grief is less visible, perhaps, but her muted shame endures as a tender darkness in these shortening hours, the light vanishing in more ways than one.

In the
Times
I read that the Strand is showing Kirk Douglas in
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea;
that the Mexico Pintos suffered their first loss of the year after the quarterback broke his collarbone; that the sensational Impacts will be playing all weekend in the Rainbow Room at the Legion hall. I read that the governor of Maine addressed the Sons of Italy on Thursday night, calling out the “ruthless Communist effort” as our greatest threat. To Bill Chisholm, who hosted the long-service banquet at the Rumford armory, our greatest threat was “competition.” Nine hundred papermakers looked up from their mashed potatoes as the Oxford's third president announced a fifty-million-dollar expansion “to ensure our future.”

Can Dad see all this from heaven?

“Sister Bernadette says life goes on,” I say to Anne. We're halfway through October, the ever-starched collar of my school uniform already wilting with wear.

“Life does go on, sweetie. It has to.” She's at the kitchen table, tabulating grades on her adding machine, a refurbished thirty-pound brute Dad bought only months ago. He'd touched it, paid for it, carried it home for Mum to wrap as a gift to their schoolteacher daughter. I love the sound—especially at night when I'm in bed—a muscular clacketing that means Anne is out there.

“I miss Fath.”

“He's busy, that's all,” she tells me. “It's hard to be a pastor.”

I sidle up to the table. “I want everything to go back how it was.” Before Dad, I mean. I blush at the unseemly baby-whine in my voice.

Anne pulls out her chair and gathers me into her lap, which is too small for me now. I've shot up over the summer, suddenly too big for her body. “We have two choices,” she says, holding me fast. “We can ask why-why-why, over and over. Why-why-why?” She pauses, letting that useless plea sink in. “Or,” she says, “we can just
do.
”

I well up. “I don't want to just
do.
”

She waits; this is how I always know she's listening. Then: “Monnie,” she whispers. “Just doing doesn't hurt as much as why-why-why.”

Of course she's guessed what I've privately been asking God for. Sometimes I ask nicely—
O merciful God, O heavenly Father
—and sometimes I don't—
Give him back! I mean it! Right now!
I've also asked God's army of surrogates—the Virgin Mary; Jesus the Son; the angel Gabriel; St. Anthony, who's good at finding things; and my own patron saint, St. Monica, whose claim to sainthood was to pray endlessly for her degenerate son, Augustine, to become a writer and saint remembered through the ages. Twenty years later God finally said to St. Monica:
Oh, all right. Happy now?

I slip off my sister's knees, infused with a resolve to do better, to be better. I finish October by writing the inaugural issue of the fifth-grade newspaper for several days running, spread out in the parlor with Denise, my co-editor. We gather all the news, write all the articles, draw all the comics, choose the weekly prayer. We use Oxford paper—store-bought by Anne—which doesn't smell the same. As Mum reads all four pages with her brow rumpled in admiring concentration, I begin, possibly for the first time, to perceive accomplishment as a way out of despair. At school I launch into spectacular overreach, reading ahead by chapters not pages, staying for
ménage
not once a week but every day, keeping my school desk a model of godliness, spritzing it daily with a lime-green fluid Sister Bernadette keeps in the cupboard. For a show-and-tell on South America, Denise and I use up a month's worth of
Times
back issues to make a papier-mâché topographical map, slopping water on Mum's parlor rug and leaving strips of paper stuck to the chairs. The finished map is so huge and unwieldy that as we wrestle it down over the first-floor landing, the Norkuses go mute with befuddlement. The messy projects tend to unfold in my household, and the neat ones—we're teaching ourselves guitar on Silvertones bought at Montgomery Ward—in hers.

This is called “doing.” This is called “not asking why-why-why.” But it is not—not exactly—life going on.

 

Coming home after school one Friday near Halloween, I open the door to find the kitchen empty, the radio off, the parakeet muttering under his breath. Is this when I first notice the absence of song? That sound I'd been hearing all summer—was it the sound of Mum not singing?

“Music is prayer,” Sister Louise, our choir director, is fond of saying. “God hears you faster.” Cathy and I sing in choir, we sing along to the jukebox at the Chicken Coop, but we don't sing here anymore. At home. In this kitchen, which had once been filled all the live-long day with my mother's voice.

We have a family song—the car-trip song, courtesy of Irving Berlin, a song I haven't heard in a long time. Months. Six months to be exact, back in April when Dad drove us to Lewiston for our annual trip to Peck's, a department store with a beguiling elevator and luscious array of Easter dresses. Dad tapping the wheel as Anne and Mum swapped roles in a syncopated show tune that demanded concentration and immaculate pitch:
I hear music but there's nooo one there! I smell blossoms but the treees are bare!
Dad's speaking voice had depth and gravel and other consolations, but a singer he was not. He liked to step-dance instead, badly, like a rooster wearing galoshes, a jokey tribute to his PEI roots,
steppity-tappity-bang-bang-BANG,
which made Mum laugh, hard and hooty, every single time. In the car that day he just listened, guiding us along a road that followed our filthy, frothing, flowing river.

These memories well up as I stow my schoolbooks and listen harder to the quiet. Sister Louise's dictum—
Music is prayer
—loops like a melody in my head. Cathy and Betty are at the Fourniers', visiting the pigeons in their coop; Anne's still at school; the ambient sounds of our family at home after a school day have been stilled. Is it this stillness that unnerves me, or merely the weather—a dampening that isn't rain, a thickening odor from the mill, portents of a late burst of Indian summer? As I wait in the softening air, I recognize how long I've missed Mum's singing, how I've pined for it, her stretched notes and dolorous crescendos in “Autumn Leaves” and “You'll Have to Go” and “Tammy,” all the most-requested from WRUM.

But all is soundless now. I mouse-creep into my bedroom to find her napping on the bottom bunk with an afghan slung over her shoulders. Across from her, on the bed I share with Cathy, Tom is sacked out on a pillow, also asleep.

“Mum?”

She stirs. The cat stirs.

“Mum? You awake?”

She rouses herself, puts on her glasses, looks at me. The cat sits up and purrs.

“Remember that song?” I ask her. “‘I Hear Music'?”

She nods. Her hair's all mashed on one side.

I wait. “‘I hear music but there's no one there'? That one?”

She tries to smile, murmuring the song's big finish: “‘You're not sick, you're just in love.'”

“Uh-huh. That one.”

I wait some more. Nothing happens. So I pick up the singing cat and give him to her.

She kisses his hard fuzzy head. “You're a
goosey
cat,” she croons. “You're a goosey goosey
gumdrops.
” This is how she talks to animals, in baby talk; we all do. But lately, at odd times, like now, she reverts to her regular voice. “Time to start supper, I guess,” she says to him, still sitting on the bottom bunk. “What about hamburg? I've got some hamburg in the fridge.” Hearing her gives me the shivers, as I half expect Dad to answer through a slit in the sky.

But neither of Mum's dearest male creatures, only one of whom talks back, can answer for Dad. The parakeet can sing four bars of “Sugartime” and open the gate on his cage, but he can't make our landlords open the gate to the garden. The cat can warm Mum's feet at night but can't lug the oil can upstairs or fix a stogged-up toilet.

Even if Father Bob could magically appear on the instant, he wouldn't be able to do these things either, not with his bad, much-operated-on back. He's famously unhandy, and the Norkuses, cowed by his cassock, behave beautifully in his presence, leaving him no opening to rectify their trespasses. We need Father Bob anyway; if he's not the man
in
the house, he's the man
of
the house. And he's gone, stuck at his parish, because the stupid bishop visited; because the stupid parish council met; because a stupid dying parishioner asked to be anointed.

Is he thinking of us, in his tidy, two-story rectory? It has white steps and a mowed lawn, not unlike the houses from
Dick and Jane.
And cats, too—pliable, affectionate, good-smelling beasts he rescued from the road. Like Nancy Drew, Father Bob has a housekeeper, a bony, aproned woman named Thurza Hines who likes children and makes cookies with M&M smiley faces before smiley faces have a name. Mrs. Hines doesn't live in, an arrangement that allows Father Bob to do some of his own cooking, and so the guest rooms and housekeeper's digs become ours whenever we visit.

Oh, the splendor of those rooms: the tasseled bedspreads, the white nightstands, the floral curtains, a bathroom to ourselves alone. Since toddlerhood we'd made these visits, each glorious one beginning with a Mass in the church next door, a Mass that looked nothing like a real Mass. We were the only congregants and it was not Sunday and we were not in Sunday clothes. No altar boys. No choir. No homily. No concelebrants. Just our magnificent uncle chanting the Offertory in a sonorous talk-singing that sounded as if it came from an ancient, echoing cave. He consecrated the host, whispering in Latin, sipping the wine till it was gone. Stillness overtook us. This was the awe of God.

After Mass we'd rush the sacristy to watch him shed his vestments, smooth out their gilded folds, and hang them in a closet made special. He stashed the chalice and paten. Everything so tidy, so proper. Each hidden place required a tiny gold key: closet, tabernacle, a cedar cupboard that held the altar linens. This was our first brush with elegance; we learned the after-Mass protocol the way children in other places learned to trim a sail or wax their skis.

Afterwards, our fists clamped around dripping ice-cream cones, we'd stroll through a town not ours where we met parishioners who patted our heads and commended our sterling behavior. We were Father Bob's wonderful girls, his honor and joy, and even in our earliest visits—early enough that I remember having to be lifted into the car—I'd perceived in his presence a dozy, distant weight, the baffling burden of being intensely loved.

Those times with Father Bob seem far away as Mum finally gets up to start supper. I follow her into the kitchen, sick with longing. “When's he coming back, Mum?”

She knows who I mean. “Bye and bye,” she says, opening the fridge. She picks up a package of hamburg and stares at it. She looks like a spirit to me, a shimmer of herself: pale, with sky-blue veins netting her temples, a faraway sheen in her eyes. At times I believe I can see clear through her; but at least she's here, right here, close enough that I can put my arms around her and squeeze. Father Bob, on the other hand, is just plain gone. I want to go to the rectory and pretend to be Caroline Kennedy in my frilly white twin bed. Even more, I want him to come to us, to visit my new fifth-grade classroom and drink Mum's coffee and finish teaching me pinochle, a complicated card game that requires two decks I love to shuffle. I want him to drive us overtown where we can strut alongside him, up and down Congress Street to window-shop and then into Razzano's for spaghetti and meatballs and Moxie with ice. I want to follow him into and out of stores where they give him free this and free that because he grew up here and went away to college and did not fail to answer his holy calling. I want to follow him like an imprinted gosling with my gosling sisters and believe he's just like Dad.